Enterprise mobility management (“EMM”) systems have gained tremendous popularity. They generally enable employees to use their own personal computing devices for work purposes, allowing enterprises to save money by purchasing fewer dedicated computing devices. Enterprises also gain productivity by implementing an EMM system because employees can conveniently perform work tasks from their own devices. The users also enjoy the advantage of having fewer computing devices to keep track of.
The management features of EMM systems can prevent sensitive data from leaving work applications, which are often managed by the EMM system. An administrator can set restrictions on company data and even remotely wipe the device of sensitive information, for example, if an employee leaves the organization. EMM systems are also gaining popularity with educational institutions because of the ability to temporary block functionality, such as email or internet access, or lock the user into a particular managed application. Therefore, EMM providers are busier than ever before with provisioning EMM systems.
However, it is difficult and time consuming to set up an EMM system. When a customer comes to an EMM provider, it can take a month before the desired EMM system is deployed. While the customer waits, they tend to inquire about other EMM systems and generally fill the wait time with questions about the EMM system that is not yet operational. The additional questions further slow the deployment of the EMM system.
Many EMM systems are deployed as cloud computing solutions. The EMM system can, for example, operate in a cloud service, such as AMAZON WEB SERVICES or another cloud-based solution having one or more cloud servers. The EMM provider typically will manually set up one or more server instances for the EMM system. Each of these different servers can require its own manual setup. This means that a large EMM system with many servers involved can be very time consuming to initially install.
As the customer's workforce grows, more server instances may be needed. This can require further manual setup by the EMM provider. In the meantime, performance can suffer due to the overloaded EMM system. In some instances, the customer does not realize their system is overloaded and performance can slowly degrade before the EMM provider is notified of any issue.
As a result, a need exists for simplified cloud-based EMM provisioning.